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‘I will show you how safe Telegram is’

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Re: ‘I will show you how safe Telegram is’

#161

Post by shrimp_emoji »

lxgr wrote: post #77
vbezhenar wrote: post #24

I monitor Russian war channels and some people there insist on using Telegram only for Russian military people. If you use Whatsapp, Ukrainian officers will get all chats from NATO. Telegram accounts of opposition were hacked by belarus police as well. It's known and documented. My takeaway is that for truly private chat one should write his own software using simple crypto without all those fancy clients. Ideally ju…

> My takeaway is that for truly private chat one should write his own software using simple crypto without all those fancy clients. That‘s actually pretty secure in practice, because you won‘t be communicating with anybody. > Ideally just use one time keys and xor everything. How do you generate the keys? How do you share them? And you only care about encryption, authentication does not matter to you at all? The chan…

>How do you generate the keys? How do you share them?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie%E2%80%93Hellman_key_exc...

Re: ‘I will show you how safe Telegram is’

#162

Post by anonym29 »

dTal wrote: post #150
kyledrake wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moxie Marlinspike is a lot of things but I'm pretty confident the queen bee of a honeypot is not one of them.

Moxie Marlinspike - and Whisper Systems - have assumed a variety of concerning positions over the years. Concerning, because their flaws are obvious, yet Moxie - a very smart guy - pretends not to notice them. For example, Moxie defended discontinuing encrypted SMS on the grounds that it leaked metadata to telcos - yet failed to emphasize that this was merely the same metadata leaked to Whisper Systems, or justify wh…

The SMS support that was discontinued was for plain SMS to/from other plain SMS numbers from within the Signal app - it was not encrypted.

Re: ‘I will show you how safe Telegram is’

#163

Post by vbezhenar »

grumple wrote: post #125
vbezhenar wrote: post #24

I monitor Russian war channels and some people there insist on using Telegram only for Russian military people. If you use Whatsapp, Ukrainian officers will get all chats from NATO. Telegram accounts of opposition were hacked by belarus police as well. It's known and documented. My takeaway is that for truly private chat one should write his own software using simple crypto without all those fancy clients. Ideally ju…

Isn't Signal open source? How could it be a honeypot? The community should be able to verify e2e encryption fairly easily.

Bugs and backdoors are indistinguishable. No software is bug-free. App stores make repeatable builds hard to achieve. Another vector to introduce changes. Might just be convenient target to attack via other means (e.g. rogue android update targeted for this special app).

I'm just a bit paranoid recently, I don't have any proofs or something like that. I, personally, would use Signal today as off-the-shelf easy-to-use solution. But for something that's absolutely must not be disclosed I'd use age (write message in text file, encrypt it via age, send base64. Supports symmetric and asymmetric encryption, schemes are simple enough, software is popular enough and super-focused.

Re: ‘I will show you how safe Telegram is’

#164

Post by lxgr »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #160
lxgr wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Textbook one-time pads are trivially malleable. Sometimes non-malleability matters just as much or more than privacy. ("This is POTUS, do$ÿ} launch the nukes!!!")

If you are a developer working for the government and in charge of this, please do not make this mistake. If you are the President of the United States and need to send a message like this, please make it completely unambiguous. Maybe repeat it several times and provide a justification.

I'm fairly confident that the US government, given that it runs the NSA, has access to a textbook or two on applied cryptography and cryptanalysis and does not need to source input on their cryptographic designs from HN :)

Re: ‘I will show you how safe Telegram is’

#165

Post by BelleOfTheBall »

akvadrako wrote: post #156
seanw444 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use group chats or unencrypted individual chats, then it's absolutely not secure. I don't use those for the security though. It's just a really nice messenger that's not Messenger. But it does also have E2E encrypted chats, and that's what you should use if you're trying to keep your conversation secret. Unfortunately many people aren't aware of that, and just assume Telegram is secure by default.

Even Telegram's encrypted chats have not had nearly enough analysis to be trusted. They used to use some bad home-grown techniques, now it's just "probably secure enough". Their client code also isn't really open source, even though they claim it is. While Signal has reproducible builds.

Huh? Their client code isn't just fully open-source, it also has reproducible builds both on Android and iOS, has been for a while. Doesn't Signal only have them on Android? It's a great app either way but if RBs matter, that's a little knock against it.

Re: ‘I will show you how safe Telegram is’

#166

Post by lxgr »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #161
lxgr wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My takeaway is that for truly private chat one should write his own software using simple crypto without all those fancy clients. That‘s actually pretty secure in practice, because you won‘t be communicating with anybody. > Ideally just use one time keys and xor everything. How do you generate the keys? How do you share them? And you only care about encryption, authentication does not matter to you at all? The chan…

> How do you generate the keys? How do you share them? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie%E2%80%93Hellman_key_exc...

Reasonable choice, but then you're doing something completely different from what GP suggested already:

> Ideally just use one time keys and xor everything.

Re: ‘I will show you how safe Telegram is’

#167

Post by tialaramex »

rakoo wrote: post #17
input_sh wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. First of all, everything's end-to-end encrypted and no chat logs are stored, so even if someone did do that they wouldn't have access to your chat history. Second of all, if someone tries to impersonate you, your contact gets a notification that your encryption keys have changed, ideally making the recepient slightly more vigilant. Finally, Signal has built-in (optional and not on by default) protection for the…

Indeed, you're right: the worst that can happen is that chat recipients would see a "your security number has changed". But nothing will happen when talking to a whole new person, or when you join a group you've never been in before.

But notice that these are all things you could do anyway. Why are we even bothering to impersonate someone else?

If local group "Superb Fun for a Superb Owl" is letting in anybody who wants to join, rather than pretending to be party animal Steve, by using SMS interception to impersonate Steve, why wouldn't a cop named Bill just join the group as Bill ? And if they don't want cops, perhaps because they suspect that "Set fire to the mall" will be considered a crime rather than a fun celebration of NFL Glory, they're not going to wave Steve through, they're going to want to check, and they'll discover that's an impersonator not the real Steve.

Re: ‘I will show you how safe Telegram is’

#168

Post by WolfeReader »

anonym29 wrote: post #157
WolfeReader wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Signal might be safe, but I think it's a honeypot." Based on what? Signal documents its own encryption process, and you can check the app source code to verify it. https://signal.org/docs/specifications/doubleratchet/ Signal is the best choice I know of when I'm looking for the union of 1. True e2e encryption, and 2. Ease of use by non-technical people.

The fact that it locks you into using their servers, does not distribute on F-Droid (only Google Play OR an APK with an insecure update mechanism), and has a completely closed-source "abusive message filter" module server side, that could functionally be used for censorship, storing messages for future decryption, or any other number of nefarious purposes - we have no idea since it's not open source ( https://github.…

Signal uses Curve25519, AES-256, and HMAC-SHA256 for its e2e encryption. So unless you believe those algorithms are insecure, there's no reason to think that their server setup is a compromise on your messages' security.

Fear of "future decryption" applies equally to all forms of encrypted communication, regardless of which servers the messages go through. And since AES-256 is known to resist quantum computing decryption, there's no actual reason to think future decryption will be an issue.

Signal has actually been approached by governments for whatever user data they have, and exactly none of it included messages - encrypted or otherwise. https://www.dailydot.com/debug/signal-grand-jury-subpoena-da...

As for everything you said about F-Droid and forking, see https://molly.im/ . It's not a "branded" fork but it does connect to Signal's servers.

Re: ‘I will show you how safe Telegram is’

#169

Post by tialaramex »

valdiorn wrote: post #34
throwaway13337 wrote: post #13

Isn't this a weakness in all SMS based verification? If you can reroute SMS auth codes, it's game over. It's too bad that most 2FA rely on this method (or use it as a fallback). I don't see how it is directly related to telegram, though.

> If you can reroute SMS auth codes, it's game over. Except it's absolutely trivial to do so, just bribe a low ranking employee of the phone company, and it's done. This has been done thousands/millions of times, usually targeting Bitcoin holders. Just google "Simjacking" I absolutely loathe when companies make me use SMS as 2FA. I flat out refuse to use the service if they force SMS for account recovery, because at…

> Oh, and the amount of hoops you have to jump through to make Gmail NOT use SMS for account recovery is insane.

GMail is as I understand it just your Google account, and so simply telling Google not to use the Phone for account recovery, by deleting that option if present, or not adding it when Google suggests you might want it, ought to be enough. Does that not work ?

Re: ‘I will show you how safe Telegram is’

#170

Post by kyledrake »

dTal wrote: post #150
kyledrake wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moxie Marlinspike is a lot of things but I'm pretty confident the queen bee of a honeypot is not one of them.

Moxie Marlinspike - and Whisper Systems - have assumed a variety of concerning positions over the years. Concerning, because their flaws are obvious, yet Moxie - a very smart guy - pretends not to notice them. For example, Moxie defended discontinuing encrypted SMS on the grounds that it leaked metadata to telcos - yet failed to emphasize that this was merely the same metadata leaked to Whisper Systems, or justify wh…

I'm not necessarily agreeing with his positions you mentioned, except to note that his focus on Signal was making an encrypted messenger that was easy enough to use that normal people would actually use it, which is a different goal than being the most secure possible and that does inevitably involve compromises and tradeoffs. He has written extensively on the problems with decentralized systems and the added complexity that makes people not adopt them, and as someone that's done extensive work in the dweb space, his arguments are quite sound and not suspicious to me in the slightest. https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

If someone wants to send encrypted messages in a decentralized way I suppose they can use PGP with Tor (a project that has also received US government funding btw) on top of a P2P network or something similarly strange, but good luck getting the non ultra tech literate friends to use any of it. They will just resort to going back to SMS because they can't figure it out, or because it's slow and doesn't work, or because a malicious actor figures out how to blast the entire network with spam messages, and then we're right back to the original problem with no improvements.

As a thought experiment here to make this conversation more constructive, what is the actually most secure way to send messages between two parties, and how many of the non tech friends has someone convinced to actually use it?

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